BOOOO!

Saturday was the offical costumed day at the dojo. They had told the kids they were encouraged to come to their classes all geared up and all geared up, they did come. It was pretty funny seeing them all, made for a very festive day. Kid's instructors were also costumed. As you would expect, it turned out to be a less than traditional for them and because of it, they got them to experiment with weapons a bit, in a controlled environment I should say :) Kids who had their bo were put together so they could practice their stuff, but many of the other kids got their first taste of it. Same goes with the nunchakus, a weapon that Andrew has not played with very often. He told me afterward that he had fun with them. Speaking of Andrew, he went as a Star Wars Clone Trooper but I didn't have my camera with me. Will try to get a picture of him and Matthew tomorrow. After their class, each kid was give a little bag of candies, a bag of chips and a juice box.

They had passed the word along last year but not as much this year. Me being a parent of a karate kid and all, I was aware of Saturday being the big costumed day and I even thought about costuming myself, as I did last year. I decided not to, as I really never have any good idea for that kind of thing. It's sort of a good thing I didn't, as not one adult was costumed. I guess, even though I didn't realize it, they really didn't talk about it in our adult classes. Sometimes, the two worlds (mine and my son's) do mix up a bit to become only one. :)

Anyway, my traditional class was a bit of everything. It started with a very intense warmup that saw us go through 50 jumping jacks, 15 pop-corn jumps, and while there usually say a 15 seconds break before we do something else, our instructor told to go straight to 25 pushups and 25 situps, WHILE we were doing the pop-corn jumps. I was sweating like a pig. We then got two by two and did some more abs work. You know when somebody is lying on his/her, head between the ankles of his/her partner and he brings up his leg only to have said partner push them back down. ugh. 25 of them. My abs were killing me yesterday. Not omcplaining though, was very happy with the workout. :)

We then worked a bit more on Cat 1, fine tuning many little things like some stances, some strikes, even some glances, applying the concepts of the bunkai for the kata. That's always something I like doing. We then moved on to work on our twelve brown belt self defense techniques to end the class with a couple times doing Sushi No Kon Sho with the bo. I kind of lead them, as I can now do it pretty much without having to think too much. This is where having a chance to practice it on Wednesday nights pays off.

We had our bo class in the afternoon. I didn't have to talk to my instructor about the show, as word had already been leaked to him. I have not talked about music to him although I have a couple ideas... I have some ideas to change to opening sequence, nothing too big. He did teach a new sequence of strikes that involves a bit of turning around, not really spinning but more like doign a 360, then strike, then turning the other way then strikes. Very hard to explain in writing, I guess a video would help but I'm not ready to demonstrate anything about that sequence. I'll tell ya one thing, I had a beeping hard time mastering some of the hand moves on that one. So much so that Andrew had it down pat before I did. :)

Practice, practice, practice...

FM